When I received notification that I was a finalist in the Susanne Millsaps Performing Songwriter Contest at the Mountain Music Festival at Snowbird, I was told that there were still some spaces available in the song school associated with the festival. Especially since I’m not going to be able to go to my usual summer music camp this year, I jumped at the chance. It’s great to be in a new community of songwriters, and I’m having a blast. Other than specific things relating to the festival itself (like the finals of the competition I’m part of), the song school is a combination of song critiques by the two lead instructors (Steve Seskin and Craig Carothers) and workshop sessions on different topics. In this post I’ll talk about the song critiques. Each person is allowed to have one song critiqued, by either Steve or Craig. Those who have been to song school before had priority for a critique by Craig because this was his first year here, and they’d already had the opportunity to work with Steve in past years. So that put me with Steve, which I was perfectly happy with – they’re both great songwriters and teachers and I would have been happy either way. Because I was scheduled to have my critique with Steve in the afternoon, I sat in on Craig’s morning session so I could hear the types of things he commented on. If you want to learn about songwriting generally, it’s almost more useful to participate in critiques of other people’s songs, because you can have enough emotional distance from the process to take in the commentary as it applies more generally (rather than have a “oh no! He doesn’t like that bridge I spent so much time on!” reaction about your own song). And Craig’s first session featured songs by many of the other finalists in the contest I’m in (because a lot of them had been to song school before), so the raw material being critiqued was excellent – which yields more useful insights to someone at my stage of songwriting. Here’s the most interesting thing so far about being in this particular songwriting community: people here behave noticeably differently than in the songwriting community I spend most of my time in, and it’s a nice change. First, everyone seems to be following the advice to only workshop a song that they’re willing to change – something unrecorded, something in process. Too often in these kinds of contexts people want to impress the instructors and so bring in their best songs (even when advised otherwise), and then are completely unwilling to entertain the sorts of changes that are suggested. Second, everyone has been fantastic at hearing, considering, and trying out the suggestions. As much as I love many things about the music community I spend time with in the Boston area, one of the things that bothers me is the extent to which people argue back in these sorts of workshops. Someone will suggest a switch from third person to first, or point out that it’s not clear what relationship the narrator has to the subject of the song, and the person getting the critique will argue back, or justify (“the reason I did it this way is . . .”). Here, everyone is willing to give the suggestions a try, usually on the spot (playing the first two verses without a chorus in between, changing from second person to third, trying a different melody line or chord progression), which a) is almost always a useful suggestion, and b) lets those of us listening hear how those changes would sound, which demonstrates the point the instructor is trying to make. The suggestions are always just suggestions – it’s your song, and once you leave here no one is going to care whether you’ve made the changes someone suggested – but it’s great how open people are to suggestions, and it’s wonderful to see what they can do to improve songs. The song I had critiqued was The Disarray (a version of which is posted on my FB fan page, if you’d like to go hear it: http://www.facebook.com/Beth.DeSombre.fan). It’s finished enough that I’m reasonably happy with it, but there are some things I’m unsure about, and some ways in which it is a departure from my normal songwriting so I don’t know if certain things make sense to an audience. Steve had a lot of great things to say about it, and actually had me play a few parts again to demonstrate things that he’d been teaching about earlier (more on which in another blog post). Everyone in the group had a discussion about whether the details of the story were revealed in a way that kept people’s interest when they start out the song not knowing what’s going on – that’s the big question I’ve had about the song – and except for one person who wanted the story to be made clear at the very beginning, everyone thought that it gave out exactly the right amount of information in each verse – and the bridge – to keep people interested and invested. The one change Steve suggested is one I never would have thought of, which is part of why this experience is so useful. We had just before been in a session on melody (more about which in the next post), and he suggested a melody change in the bridge, because the first notes go to an unusual place and then don’t give any payoff for going there. We tried a few other melody options in real time, and I completely understood his suggestion and am almost certainly going to make some sort of change. I love getting feedback of the sort that would never even occur to me. I’ll wrap this post up for now because it’s time to head off to day 2 of song school (and the performing songwriter finals, in the early afternoon). More soon!